JMC vtwm Page, vtwm themes

Most of these vtwm 'themes' were inspired from various screen prints I saw over the years.

What follows below are screen prints and config files for vtwm themes I cloned/created.

The configs are formatted for 1280x690 and 1680x1050, but you can easily change it to work with other resolutions. See below after the 'theme section' for a files related to these themes.

I use the latest vtwm beta. It has quite a few bug fixes and nice enhancements. Also for a beta it is very stable, I have had no issues with it, so if possible, you should consider upgrading to the beta (git) version.

Weather information for conky is retrieved using this is the script. It retrieves information from NOAA once every 4+ hours via cron. You should not 'hammer' NOAA (like executing less than every 4 hours) it seems to be aware it is being queried often and will block your IP for a period of time. Also, there is no need to retrieve data often since NOAA is updated a few times a day. The script retrieves a lot more data then what is shown in conky.

Screen Prints from Slackware, FreeBSD and OpenBSD

Theme 'Rubik' configuration, is built around a root image (here) created by Plasmadesign UK, they create what I think are some cool background images. These are conky configuration files for Slackware, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

Actually I use this vtwm look more than all the following, but once in a while I will use the others.

On OpenBSD, I installed vtwm in /opt so OpenBSD's W^X checking is enabled. No issues have occurred, so I fully believe vtwm is W^X compliant.

Theme 'colors' configs: (1) (2). Related applications have their own title and icon manager background color. You can see wmWeather, bubblefishymon, wmbiff and minidock 1.4 executing using "AppletRegion" setting. The root images for print 1 and print 2 came from here and here. The NASA site is quite informative.

The second image uses a slightly modified vtwmrc without clocks and only one iconmanager, it is built around this conkyrc and uses this xpm in the panner. It should work for all resolutions as long as you keep the panner at 30%. Config (2) also uses warpring, which took me years to get it working the way I like it to work :) Prior to that I use to use "f.lower".

Planet Themes (earth config) and (mars config) are both quite similar except for colors used. Also, these configs use the new True Type Font settings (nice work by the vtwm team!). One of the xplanet screens shows Earth and the other is for Mars. These are the commands I used for the root window:

xplanet -config ~/.xplanet -body earth -projection orthogonal -radius 65 -longitude -71.33 -latitude 32.64 -transparency

xplanet -origin phobos -body mars -config ~/.xplanet -radius 39% -transparency

I use Phobos as the 'origin' for Mars because of it's orbital speed. As you can see here and here, depending on where Phobos is you will see markers for the other planets. I got the map files from JPL and this, this and this are my marker files.

Theme 'slackware' (config), for my favorite distro, favorite wm. Built around an excellent root image found on slackart, direct link to Patryk's image. You may be able to see conky executing in a way that makes it look like it is part of the image. This is the config file for conky. Note, conky uses the Neo Trash font, you will have to configure these files for your on use. In the panner I use this xpm file for the background, gives a pseudo transparent look.

Theme 'As' (config) -- A look derived from an old version of Afterstep. the application shown is xaos which is a fractal zoomer/morpher. I included it to add some color to the screen print :) But it is a cool app.

Theme 'std_2' (config) -- this is based on the system.vtwmrc.3D in the vtwm source for 5.5 beta. This has quickly become one of my favorite looks. Thanks to the maintainers of vtwm for the work being done on this great Window Manager. For reference, this image was built from the default rc from 5.4

Theme 'jgrid' (config) -- a dark look with a couple of apps. You may notice there are multiple icon managers, the standard one, one specific for the WEB and a third for music. Most of my looks tend to have these 3 icon managers.

Theme 'conky' (config) -- based on the above theme but instead of the apps I have conky, executing.

Theme 'matrix' (config) -- shows how you can have an illusion of a transparent panner.

Theme 'black' (config) -- came from either a twm or a vtwm 'theme' I saw somewhere a while ago, sometimes I like this simple look.

Theme 'slate' (config) -- also came from either a twm or a vtwm 'theme' I saw somewhere a while ago, for a bright simple look.

This gzip archive (md5sums 70577c78e3b2ae21ccf82ec3900633ad) is a set of utilities to allow you switch vtwm themes using menus. It contains all the files needed for the themes shown above. See the README in the gzip archive for detail information.

As far as I know, the images included in this file has one of the "Open Source" Licenses. The icons and bitmaps came with X Window and matrix2.jpg came from themes.org.

If I am wrong about the licenses please let me know and I will remove the image in question. All objects in the file written by me is in the public domain.

Some of the above 'themes' use gkrellm, conky, xnetload, xload, xeyes and rclock. xload and xeyes is usually included with X Window and rclock is included with rxvt. I believe rclock is an underrated 'applet', along with the clock, it includes a simple appointment calendar which I think works very well with vtwm.

These are some old vtwm screens I have saved over the years: Oct 20, 2002, Nov 9, 2003 and Oct 20, 2005. I do not have the config files, the only reason I have these images is I sent them into a Linux Desktop Contest Page, which I no longer have the link to.

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